Drinking's Funny

Raymond Carver says somewhere that being a drunk takes real dedication. It’s hard work. Looking for this, I found the following in the story Gazebo:

"Drinking’s funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on our drinking, we’d be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six-pack or whiskey. When we made up our minds to move down here and take this job as managers, we sat up a couple of nights drinking while we weighed the pros and the cons."

The biggest decision I made while drinking was to keep on drinking. The biggest decision I made when briefly sober was to go back to drinking.

With these decisions come all the sins of omission, all the choices removed from negotiation: houses, vacations, schools, jobs, clothing - you name it; I took the choice away.

All the small decisions count, too – endless arguments over nothing, played on a loop, missed occasions which may have accumulated into decent relationships with others. A thousand small decisions made over all those penultimas, the ones for the road (“One for the ditch”), all those small opportunities shred useless by a thousand cuts.